A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
I’ve been lifting seriously for a while now. I’ve actually been lifting for most of my life, but I wasn’t serious about it when I was younger. As a kid I mainly just did lots of wrist curls because I was a drummer and baseball player.
While I’ve always been a fan of bodybuilding, I just didn’t really get into it until I was older. I did work out, but I didn’t know what I was doing.
Hell, I wasted a good year doing ridiculous crap like Power Factor Training and Static Contraction Training. Those were some bullshit routines. I did Heavy Duty for a while even.
Actually, it wasn’t until after I had a hernia when I was 24 that I got serious about training. The hernia was non weight training related (I used to have a job that involved a lot of box lifting and was a golfer at the time), but while I was recovering, I really started to read up and get back to basics.
Things had been moving along well with my training since then. I had put on about 30-40 pounds of muscle over a few years. Finally hit the 200 lb mark about 4 years ago and was as high as 210.
However, 2 years ago, I had a pretty bad back injury that set back my training for a while. Eventually, I healed and was getting back to where I was pre injury.
Just before Memorial Day, I tweaked my back again. Again, it wasn’t even in the gym. Simply just getting out of bed in the morning and my back just kind of went out.
It hurt pretty bad and I thought something was seriously wrong. Oddly, just 24 hours later, most of the pain in my back had gone away. I went to the doctor anyway and it appeared to check out fine. Just some muscle spasms.
About a week later, I notice some pretty significant pain in my left glute. I foam rolled the area, which seemed to help. I started to see a physical therapist, who said it was an issue with my pririformis.
I was doing what I could to train around it, and in some cases through it. It was slowly getting better over the next month or so and everything seemed fine. In retrospect, I was being pretty stupid here. I was still doing two lower body sessions a week, doing sprints twice a week and not really doing much foam rolling and stretching of the glute. Stupid right?
Towards the end of July, I noticed the pain was returning and actually worsening. By the beginning of August the pain had increased to the point where it was difficult to sit without pain.
A week later, it hurt so bad, I could barely walk. I lost a significant amount of feeling in my left foot. I was pretty scared. Again, my PT seemed to think it was an issue with the piriformis and some adhesion involving the sciatic nerve.
After a week or so, the pain lessened some and I was able to resume stretching and foam rolling. I’ve gotten to be pretty aggressive about foam rolling once I noticed significant improvement from it. Eventually, I added some mobility work and everything has been progressing along fine.
This week, I finally felt well enough to resume going to the gym. I was able to get though all my workouts so far without issue or any kind of flare up.
The only thing that sucks is that I’ve lost A LOT of strength in my lower body. I had been training my upper body for a week or two, so my upper body isn’t as far behind as my lower body, but it still has a lot of catching up to do as well.
My current goal, is to simply get back into shape. I’ve lost a lot of leg size and strength from all the inactivity. This is going to be a slow process though as I need to monitor my glute closely and make sure I don’t aggravate the issue again. I likely won’t resume anything like sprinting for at least a month or so.
I do need to lose some fat as I didn’t really change my diet much even though I was inactive for a while. Although I’m not really concerned about my weight at this point, as I’m sure cleaning up my diet and getting myself back into shape will lead to a change in body comp.
Long term, I’d like to surpass my old PRs and continue to improve on them and put on more muscle.
Anyway, sorry about the long ass life story. I basically started this log to chronicle my return to the gym and my progress. Feel free to comment, provide suggestions, ask me what the hell I’m doing, make fun of me, call me a pussy or whatever. This should be fun!
